National Golden Gloves has a rich history

GRAND RAPIDS -- Golden Gloves began as a protest movement. In some ways, it never wandered far from its non-conformist roots.

Stan Gallup remembers when the Chicago Tribune discarded the brand name it had built for more than three decades. Gallup is 86, and retired to Kentucky, but the recollection of that 1963 meeting still stirs him.

The newspaper had hosted National Golden Gloves since it created the tournament.

In one pronouncement, at the end of a business meeting, that 36-year relationship ended.

"I was shocked," Gallup said, "and I was the guy who stood up and said, 'To hell with you guys then, we'll take it over and move it someplace else.' "

Someplace else proved to be just about anywhere, including Grand Rapids, which becomes the tournament's 29th host this week.

The 81st National Golden Gloves, at DeVos Place, will continue a rich history that includes some of boxing's biggest names as champions of the amateur classic -- among them, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay), Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, and Grand Rapids' Floyd Mayweather.

The national tournament has been conducted since 1928, though its foundation was set five years earlier, when the Tribune sponsored a tournament to challenge a boxing ban in Illinois, and drew 424 entries.

In 1927, New York Daily News sports editor Paul Gallico announced a tournament called Golden Gloves. With the Illinois ban lifted, Tribune sports editor Arch Ward followed suit the next year, with an agreement that winners of the two tournaments would meet.

Within weeks, many other newspapers, including The Press, also withdrew Golden Gloves sponsorship.

Gallup, who settled in Roswell, N.M., after three years in China with the legendary Flying Tigers during World War II, was part-owner of a radio station which sponsored Golden Gloves. He quickly mustered support from a Kentucky man who pledged to underwrite the 1964 tournament in Louisville.

National Golden Gloves has returned to Chicago only once since.

"I don't think we thought about what would happen when we started moving the tournament," Gallup said. "We just wanted to have a tournament somewhere."

Gallup drew up the 32 franchise boundaries, which remain largely unchanged, except for the contraction of two franchises.

He generated new sponsorship, and by 1968 had become the first paid employee in the non-profit Golden Gloves Association of America, though he made a much better living with his sporting goods business, and relinquished his boxing pay in 1986, while retaining the top post for another 13 years.

He sent a team to South Africa during apartheid. He sent another to Cuba, where he said he met one on one with Fidel Castro.

And in the late-1970s, when the Amateur Athletic Union began to break up, and its top boxing officials asked Golden Gloves to take over as national governing body, Gallup declined.

"I personally said no, and no one else questioned it," he said. "We just felt like we were Golden Gloves, and we were going to do our own thing."

Some of the old AAU personnel joined with Armed Forces boxing officials to form the heart of the new governing body, the USA Amateur Boxing Federation, now called USA Boxing.

It long has been theorized that if Golden Gloves had taken the governing role, key changes which diminished amateur boxing's popularity -- primarily mandatory headgear, which was the military standard -- might have been thwarted.

"The AAU and ABF guys were my enemies," Gallup said. "I fought that headgear thing tooth and nail. Boxing is not a pitty-pat sport. In Golden Gloves, we came to fight. In ABF, they came to box. The ABF guys used to tell me I shouldn't say stuff like that. But there's a difference between ballroom dancing and ballet."

Golden Gloves has prided itself on such independence since its creation, as does its delegate emeritus.

"I'm the Godfather of Golden Gloves," Gallup said, "so they're pretty nice to me and don't make me do too much work anymore."